Poetry Lab: What Can a Poem Be?

Here's the lowdown on a series of workshops I'll be teaching at the Poetry Project starting Saturday, October 6th.

You can register by clicking here.

Saturday, October 6, 2012
2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Saturdays 2-4PM: 10 sessions begin October 6th

What can a poem be? We’ll attempt to answer this question while creating new modes and forms of poetry just outside the dominant culture. In this class we’ll create a safe place to take chances, to openly speculate and participate in the ongoing dialogue that ensues. There will be weekly experiments and assignments and a lot of in-class writing. We’ll tumble together through collaborations and mutual innovations. We’ll explore poetry through play, joy, openness, immediacy, profound ideologies, music, and art. We’ll take risks that allow us to reinvent ourselves as poets every time we sit down to write. We’ll create poems that don’t resemble or sound like poems; all the while being totally committed to the idea of broadening the borders of the possibilities of poetry. We’ll leap off a platform constructed by Henri Michaux, Reggie Watts, Djuna Barnes, Bill Knott, Fernando Pessoa, Hannah Weiner, E.M. Cioran, Ben Marcus, Gertrude Stein, Andy Kaufman, Sei Shonagon, Joe Brainard, Walter Benjamin, Diane Williams, and more. Todd Colby is the author of four books of poetry published by Soft Skull Press. He keeps a blog at gleefarm.blogspot.com.